Italy Comes to Bath

I have been to many wine tastings over the years.  But, for me, food and wine are meant to go together, so the tastings I enjoy the most – and get the most from – are almost always when the wines are shown as part of a dinner, accompanying well-chosen dishes.  A short trip across to Bath recently delivered this to perfection when our favourite restaurant in the city, La Terra, hosted an evening of wines from Umani Ronchi served alongside some of their own delightful dishes.

Umani Ronchi have extensive vineyards in the eastern Italian regions of Abruzzo and Marche and specialise in wines made from native local grape varieties, principally Verdicchio and Montepulciano.  After a welcoming glass of fizz, we settled down to a delicate smoked salmon mousse with generous glasses of Casal Di Serra Verdicchio alongside.  This is, perhaps, Umani Ronchi’s best-known wine – fresh and herby with some richness from brief lees ageing but completely unoaked.

In true Italian fashion, a pasta course, a raviolo filled with meltingly tender duck leg, followed.  I might have teamed this with a red, but instead we had another Verdicchio, this one from old vines and matured in old concrete vats, rather than stainless steel.  Softer and more savoury than the first and an interesting match.

Our one red of the night, Cúmaro Rosso Conero, a 100% Montelpulciano aged for 12 months in old oak barrels, was the ideal partner for the main course guinea fowl – the breast roasted and the leg meat slow cooked in a small pie.  An innovative, delicious dish and one that showed off the wine really well.

All too soon, we arrived at our final pairing.  Dessert was an orange posset with white chocolate.  I don’t recall tasting many sweet wines from this area but Umani Ronchi produced a botrytised Sauvignon, Maximo, from the Marche region.  Grown on north facing vineyards with high humidity, this had all the intense marmalade flavours that come from nobly rotted grapes and, of course, the link with the orange of the pudding was marked.

A wonderful evening where food, wine and the convivial atmosphere we always find at La Terra all came together perfectly.